Well, Andy Bitterer (aka Andy Twitterer), who is currently in Ottawa for analyst briefing day, took me to task with this reply:

“Maybe IBM doesn’t want to go down like LucidEra…”

BOOM!

My old friend Lance Walter from Pentaho stepped in with this defence of the SaaS/Cloud model:

“But failed co. doesn’t equal failed model.”

Andy’s reply: “Fair enough, but not a really proven model either. LucidEra wasn’t the first. See IT Factory. Different reason, though.”

I then asked Andy: “Are you suggesting midmarket not well suited for SaaS BI?”

His response:

“On the low end of the midmarket I see no issue. But a 1B company doing a big-ticket SaaS BI deployment I have yet to see.”

But what about enterprise departmental implementations? I saw quite a bit of interest here in my time at LucidEra, where the SaaS BI solution was sought to address specific needs of a line of business. So far, there’s been a surprisingly muted response from the SaaS BI vendors out there. Do they have proof of enterprise customer success for Andy? Was anyone else surprised not to see a SaaS/Cloud offering from Cognos or is it still considered to be too bleeding edge? What about Business Objects OnDemand from SAP? Is it still a growing concern in this market?

In the meantime, if enterprise departmental implementations are the way forward for SaaS BI vendors outside of the midmarket (Cognos aside of course), it’s certainly good news for data integration in the cloud that includes data synchronization and data replication services.

If you’re at a company that has already made a significant investment in on-premise business intelligence tools, instead of placing a bet on an early-stage SaaS business intelligence vendor, it seems to me that for many use cases a better approach would be to consider an on-demand data replication service that will help you leverage your existing investments. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a big believer in SaaS BI for many use cases, but it’s still early days for most of the vendors in this space, most of whom are targeting organizations who have not already made investments in on-premise data warehousing and reporting and analysis tools. If you’re a Salesforce.com customer, here are some use cases for a cloud-based data replication service:

Trying to access and analyze Salesforce data with on-premise reporting tools like Crystal Reports, Cognos, or even Microsoft Excel.

Having difficulty joining more than two objects in Salesforce for reporting purposes.

Struggling to ensure consistent, accurate, up-to-date, and integrated data from Salesforce and other enterprise data sources.

“Personally, I look forward to better and easier cloud integration. Our systems folks are offsite in another state and getting anything done these days is like an exercise in frustration! I know we have data we want to utilize outside of our systems, but securely. Cloud integration that could guarantee the security and not have us investing in the hardware to support it would be a big help.”